<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Sublation by chuusei_teki_na_koe</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26508508">Sublation</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/chuusei_teki_na_koe/pseuds/chuusei_teki_na_koe'>chuusei_teki_na_koe</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Lightposts [4]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Persona 5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen, Navel-Gazing, Post-Canon, Pretentious Hegelian Nonsense</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 02:42:48</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,354</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26508508</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/chuusei_teki_na_koe/pseuds/chuusei_teki_na_koe</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>After getting dumped by Akira, Goro is left with a lot of time to himself. A certain counselor has suggested he get a hobby.</p><p>So he reverts to old habits, exploring the city's restaurants like a foodie even though he doesn't care about the food. He finds a nice cafe, his spot. He comes every week on his bicycle. There's a cute barista.</p><p>Goro's new oasis is immediately invaded by a certain familiar artist furiously sketching while he ignores Goro's presence as much as Goro ignores his.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Akechi Goro &amp; Kitagawa Yusuke, Background Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Lightposts [4]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1861186</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>95</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Sublation</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Goro wasn't the type to have a go-to cafe; he'd had ulterior motives for frequenting Leblanc, he'd stopped going there after Mr. Sakura had learned about his history, and it had unsurprisingly shut down due to lack of customers about a year and a half earlier anyway, forcing Mr. Sakura to get a real job. But now that Goro no longer had fucking Akira as his default extracurricular activity, he found that he suddenly had a lot of free time for himself.</p><p>He hadn't truly realized until it was over just how much of his time had been taken up by his relationship—but now it was just suddenly gone, and he didn't even see Akira's face at school anymore. They didn't share classes, after all—Akira was in arts, while Goro was in sciences—not out of any passion, mostly just because it seemed harder and he'd always gotten top grades in biology and chemistry (well, it was just straight memorization, so how could you fail?). He cared little about school, but he was good at studying, and the idea of not going to university was even worse, so he'd entered out of sheer momentum.</p><p>So without Akira around, Goro's options were either study until his brain melted into mush, or lie in bed feeling sorry for himself, or to get a fucking hobby. He'd already tried both option one and option two, and Maruki, in his <em>infinite wisdom</em> (thinking about it now, perhaps the infinite part had literally been true not so long ago, <em>gag</em>) had suggested option three, so why the hell not?</p><p>So Goro decided to go back his fake-foodie habit.</p><p>Before, he'd done it just to have something to put on his social media, and in truth he didn't really give a damn about the food—it was all just fuel for functioning. But he did like the exploratory element of going around unfamiliar parts of the city to find new things, and it gave him an excuse to get on his bicycle and go somewhere, which is why one week he wound up in a very hipster-looking cafe in a suburb just outside of Tokyo he would usually never visit.</p><p>He ordered the first thing on their ranking popularity list (some sandwich and coffee combo), which was served to him by a distracted-looking barista who spent half his shift absently wiping at the bar while staring into space. The barista moved around enough that he didn't seem like he was blatantly slacking off, but neither was he briskly going about his duties, either, and he was always fiddling with his hair.</p><p>Goro really only went back to that same cafe because it was at the top of a rather steep hill, and on the way there he'd stopped his bicycle halfway to stand there and pant a bit, which he hadn't done in years, and he'd realized how damn out of shape he was these days, so he went back later that week swearing he would get to the top without stopping, and failed, to his frustration, but then once he was there, he figured he might as well also go to that cafe again.</p><p>The same barista was on shift again that day. He had this way of leaning against the espresso machine while he was waiting for the shot to pour, and unlike most baristas at chain places, who could only ever spout the same canned phrases their managers taught them to say, this one said to him, “Nice weather today, huh? You cycled here?”</p><p>Goro returned his best thousand-watt smile sand replied, “Yes, I'm something of an amateur cyclist,” with that ingratiating laugh that he frankly was disgusted to hear coming out of his own mouth these days.</p><p>“Nice,” the barista replied with a nod, and Goro took his meal set back to his seat, feeling like an absolute tool. <em>An amateur cyclist? Who the hell says that? Of course you're an amateur, what a stupidly redundant thing to say.</em></p><p>The food was mediocre. Goro really only kept going back to that cafe because the hill going up to it was a good workout. Every time he visited, he would exchange a few words with the barista about the weather or whatnot, and he would have his meal set while the barista faffed about behind the counter and stared into space. Goro wondered what he was thinking about, staring at the wall like that. Maybe it was nothing at all. Maybe he was just thinking he wanted to go home and take off his work shoes. Goro didn't ask.</p><p>On the third week of visiting that cafe, Goro was eating his meal set, watching the barista—whose name he learned was Inoue—slowly clean the steam wand, mind wandering. It was funny that he'd spent so much time indoors when he'd been in a relationship with Akira—perhaps because it was just easy, and they'd gotten into the habit of just meeting up for sex, and Goro had avoided anything that felt like a <em>date</em> for so long, but also because the side-effects of fame had made being in public uncomfortable, following Shido's arrest.</p><p>It seemed the nation had largely forgotten about Goro Akechi, though, since he didn't get recognized much anymore. Maybe it was just because he was older. He'd only been a curiosity because of his age, after all. It was half a relief, and half a disappointment.</p><p>When Goro had been young, he'd spent a lot of time going <em>out</em> when he shouldn't have been, breaking curfew and then lying to cover it by claiming he'd gotten lost on the way home from school. There was something comfortable about being in public spaces. Or maybe he just hadn't want to go home. It was probably the latter. Maybe that was why he kept coming back to this cafe.</p><p>A few months in, and he'd tried everything on the menu and knew the names and schedules of the regular staff. Inoue the barista was a student at a nearby art school, and he greeted Goro by name when he came in and smiled at him. It wasn't like this was the best cafe ever, but it was his spot. His <em>territory.</em></p><p>Which was, of course<em>,</em> soon invaded.</p><p>Goro noticed him immediately, the first time he turned up, but he pretended he didn't. Said individual was completely focused on his sketchbook, anyway, and didn't notice Goro's presence at all—or maybe he was pretending, too. He looked quite a bit different than he had when they'd first met—he was clearly going through some bizarre fashion phase. There had been a time when Goro had thought of him as decently fuckable, in a starving artist sort of way, but he'd apparently thrown all that out the window these days. He was wearing a strange billowy shirt-thing of clashing colors, and he looked as if he'd recently shaved his head and was letting it grow out again. He had zigzags shaved up the back, but long bangs. He looked absurd. But there were a lot of young people who looked like that in this neighborhood. The two words “art school” explained it all.</p><p>The two of them comfortably ignored each other, that day.</p><p>But then that certain individual showed up again the next week and plunked himself down in the same seat, pulling out a sketchpad while he ordered a single black coffee that he nursed for three hours. Goro knew he was nursing that coffee for three hours because Goro stayed that entire time, too, though <em>Goro</em> actually continued to buy things intermittently, and he came with a textbook and notebook for studying. This particular cafe was far out of Tokyo city proper, and quiet enough that the staff wouldn't give you the stink-eye for doing that, as long as you didn't come at the busiest hours of the day.</p><p>But the third time this particular individual showed up, he actually looked up from his sketchpad for a minute. His eyes swept the cafe. Met with Goro's. Looked at him for a solid minute.</p><p>And then he went back to sketching as if he'd never seen him.</p><p>Goro was inexplicably irked. It wasn't like he wanted Yusuke Kitagawa to come over and talk to him or anything. But the way Kitagawa ignored him, it was as if he didn't even see Goro as worth paying attention to.</p><p>After that, Goro ran into Kitagawa periodically at that cafe. They never said anything to each other or interacted, but they were both aware of each others' presence. It was like two lions at the edge of each others' territories, deliberately ignoring one another to avoid a battle for dominance. Or maybe Goro just needed to stop fucking paying attention to Shido's stupid jungle metaphors.</p><p><em>Has Akira told him about me?</em> Goro wondered for about the umpteenth time one day, focusing his eyes on his textbook and not Kitagawa and not getting any work done. He had no clue. In so many ways, Akira had always been inscrutable to him.</p><p>The other thought that kept coming back to Goro was: <em>what the hell is he drawing, every time?</em></p><p>On one day, however, Kitagawa did go up to the front a second time to buy a cookie on top of his usual black coffee. He left his sketchpad at his table when he did, so Goro took the opportunity to feign like he was going to the washroom, swinging by Kitagawa's table on the way to glance take a peek at the sketchpad, quickly flipping through the book.</p><p>It was all drawings of the same thing: a girl in various poses and angles, one of the baristas at the cafe.</p><p><em>Yikes. Stalker, much?</em> Putting the sketchpad back the way he'd found it, Goro went to the bathroom, washing his hands for a few minutes so it would seem like he'd gone, then came out again.</p><p>When he returned to his seat, however, he found someone was sitting there, and had brought his coffee, cookie, and sketchpad with him.</p><p>Kitagawa.</p><p>Goro sat down, giving a look to the man across from him. “Did you need something?”</p><p>“Are you going to finish that sandwich?” Kitagawa said as he munched his cookie, pointing to Goro's unfinished sandwich that had been sitting there for about an hour.</p><p>Really. That was why he'd broken weeks of deliberate non-interference? For a half a sandwich?</p><p>“Go ahead,” Goro said, and he went back to his biology textbook.</p><p>The sound of Kitagawa chewing was deeply irritating.</p><p>After Kitagawa was done eating, he said out of the blue, “I hope you won't tell her about my sketchbook.”</p><p>Goro realized he was talking about the barista. “Unless you're planning murder, it's really not my business who you have a crush on.”</p><p>Kitagawa's eyebrows came together in a scowl. “I don't have a <em>crush</em> on her. She merely has a certain aesthetic that I find fascinating.”</p><p>“Uh-huh. Sure.”</p><p>“Hmph. Well, I wouldn't expect you to understand.”</p><p>Goro rolled his eyes. “I think it's pretty easy to understand if you're coming here every week to stare at this girl for hours.”</p><p>“Are you sure that's not you projecting?” Kitagawa replied, eyes on his sketchpad again as he opened up a new page.</p><p>“Huh?” Goro was just confused. What the hell was he talking about?</p><p>Kitagawa glanced up. “You. Coming here every week to stare for hours.”</p><p>“Oh, don't flatter yourself,” Goro spat with sincere disgust, raising his coffee cup to his lips.</p><p>“I don't mean at <em>me.</em>” Kitagawa jerked his head over toward the bar—at Inoue the barista. Eyes still on his sketchpad, he commented, “He does look a lot like Akira.”</p><p>Goro choked, spitting his coffee back up into his cup. Kitagawa was unperturbed, focusing on his sketch as Goro hacked coffee out of his nose and groped for a napkin to wipe his face. “What the hell do you know?” he hissed when he got control of himself again.</p><p>Kitagawa raised an eyebrow. “I don't know what you mean. I always assumed you were interested in Akira. Am I wrong?”</p><p>“I always assumed <em>you</em> were interested in Akira.”</p><p>“Of course I was,” Kitagawa admitted readily. He was silent for a long minute, drawing, before he looked up at Goro, and seeing his face, realization seemed to dawn on him. “Oh, you mean <em>sexually.</em>”</p><p>Yet again, Goro was confused. “Of course I mean sexually. What else would I mean?”</p><p>Kitagawa shrugged. “Aesthetically. Platonically. Ideologically, spiritually...”</p><p>Goro leaned back in his chair and sighed. “I'd forgotten what a fucking weirdo you are.”</p><p>Kitagawa smiled as if Goro had just complimented him. “To clarify, I was never sexually interested in Akira.”</p><p>“Thank you for sharing that fact with me,” Goro said sarcastically, but somewhere deep inside his heart a knot of longstanding pointless jealousy unraveled, and he was highly disgusted by himself. “And you're not sexually interested in this girl, either? Do you just not like sex?”</p><p>“Sex is all right,” Kitagawa said, as if he were talking about whether or not he liked tomatoes.</p><p>“So why come back here to draw fifty pictures of this girl if you don't want to have sex with her?”</p><p>“The same reason you keep coming back here to stare at that other barista.”</p><p>“I'm <em>not—</em>”</p><p>“You are.”</p><p>Goro bit his tongue.</p><p>“Do you want to have sex with him, then?” Kitagawa asked with a bluntness that was frankly rather offensive.</p><p>Goro was not exactly keen on discussing his sexuality with <em>anyone,</em> least of all this freak. But there was no sense in lying, either. Apparently Kitagawa had already pinged him, anyway. “I mean, if I had the opportunity, sure, I'd fuck him,” he said with a shrug.</p><p>“But you haven't asked him out.”</p><p>“Of course not.”</p><p>“So you don't actually want to have sex with him.”</p><p>Goro opened his mouth, then shut it. There was a weird sort of logic to what Kitagawa was saying. “It's not really on the table, that's all.”</p><p>“The relationship between myself and that barista,” Kitagawa said, as if he were ignoring what Goro had just told him, “is nothing more than this. She offers me everything I want without my taking it from her.”</p><p>Goro gave him a hard look for a moment. “But if she leaned over the counter and confessed she liked you and wanted to meet you after her shift. What would you say?”</p><p>“Of course I would say yes. But that won't happen. It's just a fantasy that I enjoy, but I have no interest in pursuing.”</p><p>Goro snorted. “It sounds to me like this is all convoluted rationale for being too chickenshit to ask her out.”</p><p>“...Perhaps,” Kitagawa said, and he continued drawing.</p><p>Goro's eyes dropped to his biology textbook again, but he wasn't really concentrating on it.</p><p>Apparently Kitagawa wasn't much concentrating either, as Goro stopped hearing his pencil scratching. He looked up to see Kitagawa with his pencil pressed pensively against his lips.</p><p>“What?” Goro asked.</p><p>“I was just thinking,” Kitagawa said slowly. “About if I really do want to ask her out. And I really do think the answer is no.”</p><p>At this point, Goro was starting to ask himself why he was even having this stupid conversation with this guy he didn't even want to be speaking with, but perhaps it was just his perverse desire to win an argument. Part of him wanted to prove that Kitagawa was a sad sack lusting after some barista without the balls to ask her out. Misery loves company, after all.</p><p>“But you just said you would take her home, given the chance,” Goro pointed out.</p><p>“Yes, but no,” Kitagawa said vaguely. “I thought about what would happen if I did take her home, what might happen if we began to see each other regularly, if she were interested in me, and I start wondering about her hobbies and what she does after she's off work... And then I start imagining one thing after another, and the more I think about it, the more I want to draw her again, and I get so busy drawing her that I don't have the time to go talk to her.”</p><p>“...Weirdo.”</p><p>Kitagawa just smiled. “So then how about you? What's your relationship to that barista?”</p><p>“There is no relationship.”</p><p>“Then what's your relationship to Akira?”</p><p>Goro opened his mouth and snapped it shut before he could say something he would regret. “...That's really none of your business.”</p><p>“...I see.”</p><p>Kitagawa didn't press him at all, and somehow, that just irritated Goro more.</p><p>“...Hypothetically speaking,” Goro began after a long silence, “let's say I were to approach that barista, and he was interested. Let's say we did fuck a few times, and we got along well. So then what? We see each other regularly? He fills up my time, texts me all the time. How am I supposed to breathe? It would be suffocating.”</p><p>“Yes, exactly,” Kitagawa nodded. “You see her once, you see her twice, and then suddenly, she's over every day and you don't think about anything else, and you haven't touched an easel in weeks. It's suffocating.”</p><p>Goro leaned back in his chair with a smirk. “And here I thought I'd never agree with you on anything.”</p><p>“I never thought that of you,” Kitagawa replied, irritatingly. The more Goro looked at him, the more he got the sense that Kitagawa was holding the sketchpad up in front of him like a shield. He rarely met Goro's eyes. “I've always thought we were very much alike.”</p><p>That snapped Goro's mouth shut. <em>That</em> was a mountain of things he very decisively did not want to talk about.</p><p>“The truth is,” Kitagawa went on, eyes down at his notebook, and now that Goro was paying attention, he noticed the pencil was just squiggling and doing random circles. Kitagawa was not drawing anything at all. “When I fall in love with a girl, I become obsessive. I message her every day, I draw her over and over, and then I become irritated with myself for doing that and toss my phone off a bridge and spend a week locked in my room drawing oranges instead, and then she dumps me for disappearing on her.”</p><p>That was a very specific-sounding narrative. “I don't care about your relationship drama.”</p><p>But Kitagawa just went on blithely, ignoring Goro's remark. “And not just with girls. I'm like that with male friends, too. I wanted Akira to be everything to me, and became angry when he couldn't be.” His eyes flicked up, and seeing Goro's look, he added, “Oh, I did try sex with men, but it's rather not to my taste. Penises are so ugly, don't you think? Like little wrinkly sausages.”</p><p>“No, I don't think,” Goro replied dryly.</p><p>“Really?” Kitagawa said, as if he were highly intrigued. “What do you find so appealing about them?”</p><p>“I'm not going to sit here in public,” Goro shot back, voice low, “And opine to you loudly on how much I love dick, sorry.”</p><p>“...Oh, my apologies. Is that supposed to be a secret?”</p><p>This guy really was an alien from another planet. “Of <em>course</em> it's a fucking secret.”</p><p>“...Hmm. I see.”</p><p>And then Kitagawa went annoyingly silent again, leaving Goro alone with his thoughts about dick.</p><p>What Kitagawa had said about becoming obsessive was sticking with him weirdly.</p><p>Goro was obsessive. He couldn't deny it. Someone who was any less than obsessive wouldn't have come up with a meticulous revenge plot and come that close to actually completing it. When he got something in his head, it would be going around and around every single day, and he'd hold onto it forever.</p><p>And when he liked someone—and it wasn't as if Akira had been the first at all, Goro had had as many crushes as anyone else—he did the same thing. He became obsessed, then he pushed them away.</p><p>“They call that disorganized attachment, you know,” Goro said suddenly, picking up his coffee mug to swirl around the remaining latte, staring down at it with no intention of drinking it. “I read about it in some introductory psychology course.” A lie. Maruki had told that to him in one of their sessions, but he sure as fuck wasn't going to start talking about the fact that he was seeing <em>any </em>counselor, much less <em>that</em> one. “An unhealthy habit that's a barrier to secure relationships, apparently.” He couldn't hide the scorn in his voice.</p><p>Kitagawa looked thoughtful, his pencil swirling around on the page. “I must say I'm not fond of anyone telling me the right and <em>healthy</em> way to go about my life,” he said, and there was a surprising anger in his tone.</p><p>“I'm just repeating what the textbook said,” Goro said blandly.</p><p>“That's exactly it,” Kitagawa said, and his scribbling on the page got louder and more aggressive. “How do they come about that information? By doing studies of large populations, taking averages, seeing what <em>most</em> people are like, and categorizing everyone into groups that they can label. As if you could boil down the human experience to some kind of archetype of what's most appropriate.” There was a <em>snap</em>, and Goro realized it was his pencil lead breaking.</p><p>Weirdly, though, Goro was totally on board with everything he'd just said. “Exactly. And what exactly is the ideal they're trying to mold you into, anyway? Someone who falls into line with their values, someone who doesn't make anyone uncomfortable. Someone who gets along with society, someone who's <em>happy</em>, because happy people don't cause trouble or fuck people up.” And hadn't Goro seen enough of that firsthand to believe it was worth shit.</p><p>“<em>Yes</em>,” Kitagawa suddenly leaned forward and smacked the table, making Goro jump and pull away. But Kitagawa barreled on, ignoring his reaction. “What value is there to be had in living that sort of life, coasting along with no real struggle? You just wind up like all the rest of them, whining about that time they missed an exam or that professor who said a mean thing, lacking any real perspective in life, overreacting over a thumbtack.”</p><p>Goro clicked his tongue. He'd met enough of those types to irritate him into an early grave—kids who had never had to do anything real for themselves, who had never done anything but what their parents and society had laid out for them, because they'd never had to. “And you better not tell them they have no real problems, or they'll <em>really </em>get offended.”</p><p>“Indeed. They're so obsessed with trivial nonsense, they have no room to consider what really matters.”</p><p>“It's such a waste of time talking with people like that.”</p><p>“It's why I prefer to be alone. See, I knew we were alike.”</p><p>Goro scowled, folded his arms and looked away.</p><p>After a moment of silence, Kitagawa sat back in his seat and cleared his throat. “And so in that vein, I don't feel it necessary to make my relationship to this barista anything other than what it is. I become obsessive, but I don't see that as a bad thing. It's gotten me this much drawing practice.” He flipped through his notebook. “And I'd rather practice drawing her while fantasizing about what won't happen than follow through and find myself drawing less, and my identity eaten away by my own obsession.”</p><p>This conversation was becoming highly uncomfortable, but it wasn't like there was a clear point in it where Goro had an exit, either. “...Well, at least you have something productive to channel it into. It's nice.” Did that sound jealous? Oh, it had definitely sounded jealous.</p><p>“Well, you could do the same, if you wanted to.” Kitagawa opened up his pencil case and brought out a new pencil to start squiggling again.</p><p>“I have no interest in making shitty sketches of that cute barista.”</p><p>“I don't mean art,” Kitagawa nodded down at the page. “There's nothing special about art, really. If I'd been raised by a sushi chef, I probably would be squeezing rice at this moment and calling that beauty.”</p><p>“Unfortunately, my mentor was a megalomaniac, and he recommended I go into politics,” Goro said dryly, then regretted it once it had popped out of his mouth.</p><p>Kitagawa looked up at him. “...Do you want to?”</p><p>“...Probably not. But it's not as if I want anything else.”</p><p>Kitagawa hummed, then looked back down at the page in front of him. “I don't think it matters what you want. You just start doing something, and you become that, eventually. I was always told I was a good artist, so I became one.”</p><p>“I've been told I'm good at murder.”</p><p>Kitagawa, surprisingly, laughed. “Then maybe try that.”</p><p>Goro snorted, and cracked a smile in spite of himself. “You're telling me to invest in a future career as a hitman?”</p><p>“I mean, you have experience in the field.”</p><p>Goro snickered, tried to smother it with one hand, then just started laughing harder. He managed to swallow it when he saw a woman at table beside them looking. “...Very edgy humor you have there. I know some who would disapprove.”</p><p>Kitagawa just smiled at him. “I'm not one to judge someone for alternative life choices.”</p><p>“...Are we talking about murder or about fucking men?”</p><p>“Oh, I was talking about murder.”</p><p>Goro sighed in exasperation. Kitagawa was just fully beyond his understanding. “I'm not going to become a hitman. ...Don't you ever think about going back, though? To the Metaverse, I mean.”</p><p>Kitagawa seemed pensive for a moment. “It would be nice to use as artistic reference. But I have no desire to fight shadows or whatnot. I've had quite enough brushes with death.”</p><p>“That's what makes it exciting, though.”</p><p>“I beg to differ.”</p><p>“You're boring.”</p><p>“Akira told me the same thing when I told him I had no desire to go back.”</p><p>Goro's eyebrows just about leaped into his hair. He couldn't believe that Akira would ever say anything mean about anyone. “What? You're kidding me.”</p><p>“Is that such a surprise?” Kitagawa tilted his head. “Akira will be forthright sometimes. I feel like he's become more like that, these days. It used to be I never knew what he was thinking.”</p><p>“I still never know what he's thinking,” Goro leaned back in his chair with a sigh.</p><p>“...So you do spend time with him, still? You've always avoided our get-togethers. I thought you were still friends with Akira, though.”</p><p>Goro narrowed his eyes at the other man. “Oh come on, no use being coy now.”</p><p>“Coy?” Kitagawa stared at him. “About what?”</p><p>Was this guy for real? Honestly and truly for real? “...Never mind.”</p><p>“...<em>Oh.</em>” Kitagawa suddenly clapped his hands, and Goro jumped in his seat. “Are you two in a relationship? Ahh,” he nodded like it all made sense now. “Why didn't you just say that?”</p><p>Goro brought a hand to his forehead and breathed a deep, deep sigh. “We were, we're not anymore.”</p><p>“Ah.”</p><p>“It's fine,” Goro went on, his lips moving ahead of his brain, “It was such a time investment anyway, a relationship like that takes over your life...” He trailed off, then fell silent.</p><p>It wasn't like he had anything else going for him. Why not let himself be devoured, have every jagged edge that wouldn't fit be filed away so he could be subsumed to Akira's desires to fix him? Why not take all of Maruki's stupid textbook advice, become well-adjusted, good, and right? Finish university, become a salaryman, have a normal relationship and a normal life, go drag himself over to all of Akira's friends and grovel until they were all convinced he was a changed man and they could all live happily ever after. And maybe with Maruki's qualified headshrinking, he'd even be brainwashed into becoming the person he faked being.</p><p>Frankly, the very idea of it made him sick. But it wasn't like he had anything else. He couldn't go back to the Metaverse—that life was gone, gone, gone, and half his soul with it. After battling <em>gods</em>, was he supposed to be satisfied by fucking biology class? None of this meant anything. How could Kitagawa or Akira or any of the rest of them be <em>satisfied</em> by this stupid petty life?</p><p>Goro didn't feel like he was alive unless he was staring death in the face. And he doubted that would ever change.</p><p>If only he could find something so mundane as sketching some cute barista over and over a good enough purpose to live for.</p><p>He'd found Akira to be a good enough purpose to live for, for a time—because he was obsessive like that, he'd lived for Akira just like he'd lived for Shido, and there was functionally no difference there, really, wasn't it the same sort of feeling in the end? Except he felt guilty about wanting to kill Akira and justified about feeling that way about Shido, so in a way, being around Akira made him feel worse.</p><p>But he was sick of being attached to people like this, sick of being subsumed. He'd always been sick of it, it was just that his previous solutions had been murder, and that hadn't really worked out for him.</p><p>Maruki would probably just say it was insecurity, and that he could change his mindset to form a stable relationship if he interrogated his actions and thought patterns. Just <em>thinking</em> about the arrogant, know-it-all, pseudo-empathetic way he would say that irritated the hell out of Goro.</p><p>But then wasn't that the exact same thing? Wasn't that sublation under a different name? How was letting Maruki mold him any different than letting Akira do it, or letting Shido do it? What gave any of them the right to decide what was best for his life? Did Akira's affection or Maruki's piece of paper from an institution make their choices for him more valid than someone who and simply been using him for ambition's sake? At least with Shido, he knew he had the high ground.</p><p>Maybe this was just a twisted sort of pride. As much as he thought himself a monster, Goro didn't hate himself—he never had. Maybe narcissism was just genetic, because he had that in spades, while conversely, he treated the world with as much scorn as Shido had. But it seemed like he was surrounded on all sides by people who wanted him to change. It had always been like that—that was why he faked it, to meet those expectations. But his heart, he kept intact and private, for himself, even if no one else understood it—because no one else <em>would</em> understand it.</p><p>Akira probably just wanted more of the same out of Goro.</p><p>No, Maruki did have one point, when it came to Akira—Goro tended to make negative assumptions about him. In truth, he had no idea what Akira wanted. He'd avoided asking.</p><p>“If it didn't take over your life, though,” Kitagawa said suddenly, jolting Goro out of his thoughts, “how worthless would that be?” He looked up at Goro, then down at his sketchpad. “Imagine living for anything less than obsession. I honestly pity those who don't have it in them to delve into those depths.”</p><p>Goro unfolded his arms and gave Kitagawa a long, evaluating look. He'd always thought of him as a bit of an idiot—someone with his head in the clouds, who thought he could eat his art. But perhaps he wasn't stupid so much as...willfully in denial of intelligent life choices. For aesthetic reasons.</p><p>Goro was never going to understand that.</p><p>But well. Goro didn't hate him.</p><p>“...Are you going to finish that coffee?” Kitagawa looked at the half-drunk cup that he had to have seen Goro backwash into at the beginning of their conversation.</p><p>...And Goro had just about begun to half-respect this idiot. “Disgusting weirdo,” he muttered, shoving his cup over at Kitagawa.</p><p>With a mysterious and irritating smile on his face, Kitagawa tossed back the coffee.</p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>